Sheldon Harnick
“Musical Theatre’s Great Marriage Broker”
The musical theatre lost one of its great lyricists this past week Sheldon Harnick at the age of ninety-nine. Sheldon Harnick wrote the lyrics for Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello, She Loves Me, and The Body Beautiful, about which I have written elsewhere. He contributed the Preface to my book The Performing Set, The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart (UNT Press) for which Carol Burnett wrote the Forward. Since the little known The Body Beautiful (1958) was Sheldon’s first musical on Broadway as well as his first collaboration with the husband-and-wife designer team about whom I was writing, he focused on that show. But Sheldon was a wealth of information and wonderful raconteur about so many other shows and operas, and he attended the theatre regularly. I will be forever grateful to him for what he shared with me.
His two decades long relationship with Jerry Bock broke up over a director change in their short-lived musical The Rothschilds (1970), but both Bock and Harnick called me when I produced Fiddler for TCU in the early nineties. Bock was elated that TCU was doing Fiddler. The Eckarts were somewhat disappointed at seeing Ukrainian peasant costumes representing Jews from the Latvia/Lithuanian region depicted in what the TCU designer considered “more colorful” garb. But ah, well – the producer in an academic setting does not get to call all the shots.
If you want to know read more, please read The Performing Set.
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